MPL's Blog

Category: Apple

This is an epic tweet storm about Apple’s development process by Steven Sinofsky. If you don’t know him, he ran the Microsoft Office business unit for over a decade. This rant touches on how to balance quality, launch dates and features, IBM, iPhone dominance and more…

1/ Apple has a software problem. Here’s how it plans to fix it. https://t.co/dJaikfRhs7 via @markgurman // Let’s take a step back and talk about the broader context and product development at scale. Lots follows…

3/ Scanning the landscape, it is important to recognize that in total the work Apple has been doing across hardware, software, services, and even AI/ML — in total — is breathtaking and unprecedented in scope, scale, and quality. Not saying that lightly or trolling. It just is.

5/ The pace of change has been remarkable. In the 10 years from when Apple acquired NeXT OS X was reinvented in a completely modern architecture. And in the next 10 years the iPhone went from that code to where we are today.

7/ Microsoft Office released ever 18-30 months from about 1990-2010 but had a shaky start so you could say that from 1995 it kept that cadence but today puts out mostly modest visible changes to be SaaS like.

9/ The only comparable project would be IBM System/360—the creation of IBM 360 hardware and software. The PC of course, but the scale (even at the time) was much less. Windows NT clearly had the scope/scale of software but had been done before (VMS) and built on PC h/w.

11/ What is lost in all of this recent discussion is the nuance between features, schedule, and quality. It is like having a discussion with a financial advisor over income, risk, and growth. You don’t just show up and say you want all three and get a “sure”.

13/ In practice when building Office (and later Windows) whenever someone on the team would panic and ask “are we date driven, feature driven, or quality driven” we would just roll our eyes and pull up a chair…This was so common we just called it conversation #37 and move on.

15/ Customers don’t care about any of that and that’s ok. They just look for what they care about. Each evaluates through their own lens. Apple’s brilliance is in focusing mostly on two audiences—end-users and developers—tending to de-emphasize the whole “techie” crowd, even IT.

17/ This approach is rather unique compared to other tech companies that tend to develop new things almost independent of everything else. So new things show up and look bolted on the side of what already exists. (Sure Apple can do that to, but not usually).

19/ There’s nothing magic about this. It goes back to a balancing act. Mature orgs just manage this the whole time. There are processes and approaches that you use so you never face the absurd notion that this is a zero sum trade off between quality, schedule, features.

21/ What I think it happening at Apple now is not more dramatic than that. What they had been doing got to a point where it needs an adjustment. Reality is that for many at Apple it feels dramatic b/c it might be first time they have gone through a substantial “systems” change.

23/ In my view the ‘moment’ is being manufactured a bit right now because of the perception that the Apple products have become less stable or…”buggy”. This is where the “signals” about the state of the world can get confusing.

25/ How does that explain general “buggy” feeling w/ so many super smart/skilled people saying products are suffering? It’s because of the depth and scale of usage that comes w/success. A responsibility.

27/ I can’t prove this but I’ve also worked on some really big projects where people said the same thing and we had tons of data. Apple has the same data. What is different is that at scale a bug that happens to 0.01% of people is a lot of people. A stadium full or more.

29/ The more a product is used the more hyper-sensitive people get to how it works. The human brain is extraordinary in how it recognizes even the slightest changes in responsiveness, performance, and sequencing of operations.

31/ But what happens to a team as complexity evolves is simply the challenge of coordination and more importantly consistency or leveling of decisions across a complex system. This is particularly acute if the bulk of the team has only known the previous few years of success.

33/ They have more data and understanding to make adjustments than anyone. The only thing I think is fair to say from the outside is that this is not nearly as dramatic as it is getting made out to be…

35/ The idea though that this is some massive shift to focus on one dimension of the overall product process: quality OR features OR date is just **nonsense**. Nothing of scale is thought of or executed that way.

41/ Some people say “oh consumer products need yearly releases” or “enterprise need constant value for SaaS”. The only thing you need is to do good products when you have them. In the scheme of things market timing except for seasonal-only products isn’t how to scale for 1B.

43/ Growth hacking or “move fast break things” sounded great until it wasn’t. This especially doesn’t/never worked in enterprise. Again, adopting a methodology absent building a great product *always* fails. “Internet time” was kind of a bust the first time around.

END/ So to me on Apple, even as an outsider, I feel confident saying that this isn’t reactionary/crisis or a response to externalities. Importantly it isn’t a massive pivot/“student body left”. It’s a methodical and predictable evolution of an extremely robust and proven system.

I made a few fun purchases in 2017. Here’s two that captured my attention…

AirPods

They look ridiculous but man are they useful. I love them over all my other headphones because they

They connect to my phone every time, immediately and magically.

The charging mechanism is genius. Having the storage compartment be the charger is so smart.

Siri is nice on it. Every day, as i’m walking out of work, i pop them in my ear, hear a little noise that notifies me that they are on and connected. I then just double-tap the side of the earphone and say “Call Diane” and, having no idea where my phone is, a call is placed to Diane. It’s a big of magic.

Apparently, i’m not alone. The customer satisfaction surveys around these are off the charts – 98% from all customers with NPS of 75 and many people believing that this is the best Apple invention since the original iPhone.

Apple Watch

I usually get a new iPhone every year so i can experience the latest and greatest. I spend hours a day on my phone and i justify the cost by this time and usage. However, this year’s lineup of iPhone X and 8 didn’t seem to be the latest and greatest. Sure there’s FaceID but having a new way to unlock my phone isn’t a reason to buy. There’s the big screen of the X, but i already have a 7 Plus which has a big screen. So, i wasn’t buying.

I WAS impressed with the new Apple Watch. It seemed that they had put the phone into the watch. This seemed like the new phone to experiment with. I also could imagine a future as: Apple Watch + AirPods + AR glasses = iPhone is just a battery pack that I never take out of my pocket. So, if that’s the case, I wanted to see what this future looked like.

I do enjoy it. Some observations

I have the LTE option so I don’t need my phone ever to get calls or texts or updates. While that’s cool and I do leave my phone at my desk at work all of the time now, I am rarely that far away from my phone. So, i never get the chance to really test this feature.

The battery life is great. I can go almost 3 days without a charge.

I do wish the watch was smaller. It’s too fat. I want a version that’s slimmer and has half the battery life. I’d be okay with that

The exercise app is the killer app for me. It keeps me putting it on every day as i want to see my steps, stands, and calories and how it measures up against other days. I’ve always been a sucker for gamification and motivates me.

PS: Shout out to my parents and wife for getting me both of these as birthday presents. You guys rock.

Apple announced the new iPhone 7 yesterday and announced that they are removing the headphone jack. Some quick thoughts on that…

Short Term Pain

It’s annoying to have to live in a world where my phone does not have a headphone jack as I have many different headphones laying around and to use them I have to use an extra dongle that i have to carry with my phone. Also, for people who want to listen to music and charge their phone at the same time – a common use for Uber and Lyft drivers, this is now impossible (although i did see this solution). For all of these reasons, I think it will be a pain in the ass for many people – including myself in the short term.

Moving towards the future

I do think that the wireless technology of headphones is underrated and way more advanced than we are aware. By forcing the issue and making these headphones mandatory, Apple will bring more and more great wireless headphones available. I can imagine a world in 5 years where everything is wireless.

From my use of the Echo, I does seem that the only thing between the cloud and my is voice. Having a sweet set of headphones that can access it all of the time seems like the right way to go.

The use of the word “courage”

This was totally ridiculous. Apple, even if you think it, don’t say it. When you’re causing so much short-term pain to your customer, don’t get up on stage and pat yourself on the back. That was a dumb move.

The Apple eco-system

Now all headphone manufacturers who build a lightning connector are married to the iPhone. Doing this will result in more lock-in than ever before. This was definitely part of their thought-process when coming to this decision. Apple loves the lock-in.

I just read this article by Michael Simmons and it was really interesting. It states that that simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success.

The idea is that people in open networks have unique challenges and perspectives. Because these curious folk are part of multiple groups, they have unique relationships, experiences, and knowledge that other people in their groups don’t. These views lead to more and better opportunities.

The chart for this is:

It also interesting to see how this played out with Steve Jobs. He always advocated for diversity of experiences. In a Wired interview in 1995, he said:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.
So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I love this position. The experiencing of different industries, different cultures and different perspectives is a great goal to have.

One of my little pet peeves is how people use their dock on their Mac.

Here’s my logic. What do you do most on your computer? You read web pages from top to bottom. Because of this, your page is maximized from top to bottom and you spend most of your time scrolling. There is usually extra space to the sides of the page.

Why then, do you take up extra space on the bottom of the page with a dock? You are constrained vertically but have surplus horizontally. It makes so much sense for you to have your dock on the left or the right.

If you have it on the bottom and set to hide that solves most of the problem, but because you scroll so much up and down, you can hit your dock by accident a bit. But it works.

I listened to the announcement last week and have a lot of thoughts on the upcoming iPhone.

Apple’s launch event came, and delivered (mostly) what had been leaked and/or expected: a larger iPhone & a phablet, payments and a smart watch. The phones are mostly predictable: the customer is always right, and the customer has decided to optimise for pocket size and experience over thumb size (the changes in iOS7 & iOS8 have made it possible to do this, incidentally).

Why did they make it bigger?

Basically, Apple dominates the high end of the phone market. They like it that way. To date, there has been a few high-end Android phones eating away at their sales (mostly Samsung phones). There are currently six reason people buy these phones (taken from Benedicts’s Blog):

Their operator subsidies an Android but not an iPhone – this has now ended, with Apple adding distribution with all the last significant hold-outs (Sprint, DoCoMo, China Mobile)

They don’t particularly care what phone they get and the salesman was on more commission to sell Androids or, more probably, Samsungs that day (and iPhones the next, of course)

They have a dislike of Apple per se – this is hard to quantify but probably pretty small, and balanced by people with a dislike of Google

They are heavily bought into the Google ecosystem

They like the customizations that are possible with Android and that have not been possible with iOS until (to a much increased extent) iOS8 (more broadly, once could characterize this as ‘personal taste’)

They want a larger screen.

The first has largely gone, the second is of little value to an ecosystem player and nets out at zero (i.e. Apple gains as many indifferent users as it loses) and the third is small. Apple has now addressed the fifth and sixth. That is, with the iPhone 6 and iOS8, Apple has done its best to close off all the reasons to buy high-end Android beyond simple personal preference. As Benedict Evans states, “You can get a bigger screen, you can change the keyboard, you can put widgets on the notification panel (if you insist) and so on. Pretty much all the external reasons to choose Android are addressed – what remains is personal taste.”

What’s the deal with ApplePay?

A lot of people are saying “they are going to make a ton of money with ApplePay!” and “They are going to crush PayPal!” – both are not even close to true. If you look at what they are actually doing here, it’s not to take on banks, credit cards or any actual payment system. They are taking on the wallet. If you look at what they did with music – they didn’t put Universal Music out of business, they didn’t come up with a better way to be a label, they just crushed the music store (like Tower Records). It’s the same here. You still need a credit card. You still need a bank to issue thecard. You just don’t have to pull it out or even have it when buying something.

I just pre-ordered my new iPhone 6 (not the Plus) to get it on Friday. What about you? You buying one?

Saw this from Dixon’s blog over the weekend. It’s a good clip from Steve Jobs in 1995 where he talks about how building great products and thought it was worth a repost.

As the head of Product at Kapost, it really resonates to me as we often start off with a product idea and through months of discussion and design, come out at a different place – one that is always better than where we began. I also like the talk of keeping things out of product. In my opinion, that’s one of the hardest part of design product – trying to intentionally remove or not include parts that customers claim they want.

The Jobs quote:

There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

That’s one thing I love about product. You need to understand design, your business, competitive landscape, your customers, technology and how to get things done. It’s one of the more interdisciplinary roles a company has.

I recently heard someone talk about what a bad move it was for Apple to release their own Maps app on the iPhone. I’ve heard this maybe half a dozen times lately and I couldn’t disagree more. We should all be happy this happened. Here’s why…

About a year ago when there was no Apple Maps, the situation was this:

The default map app on the phone was Google maps

Apple had repeatedly been negotiating with Google to have them provide turn-by-turn directions and voice navigation in their app on the iPhone. Google had turned them down time and time again so they could promote Android phones and claim some level of superiority.

Apple had no alternative but to accept that Google was sandbagging their iPhone app

Fast forward to today. Apple releases Maps which has turn-by-turn directions that are way better than the old Google app. Google was rendered to be an optional app on phone and because of this fact they stepped up their development efforts and made the Google maps app way better than their previous app.

Today iPhone users have two great options for maps and both options are way better than they had a year ago. If Apple hadn’t done anything, we’d probably still be stuck with a second-tier version of Google maps.

So, Apple’s probably pretty happy with their decision. The iPhone mapping capability is at the very least comparable to Android, something they couldn’t claim a year ago.

Ok, i can now go back to work. Thanks for letting me rant.

May 2015 Update:

Looking at this latest report you can see that 84% of cell phone users get turn-by-turn navigation while driving. Looks like Apple made a good call to really shake up the platform to get that functionality in there.

About 10 months ago, I watched this video on Kickstarter and was really intrigued about the thought of having a watch send me updates from my iPhone.

I put some money down in May 2012 and waited. And waited. And waited. It just so happens that I wasn’t the only one who wanted this. The guys at Pebble raised over $10 million for their watch. They then got started mass producing the watches which proved to be harder than they thought. That said, last month I finally received my watch – almost 11 months after I backed the project. Continue reading “My Pebble Watch”→

I have now been using my iPhone 5 for over 3 months and really love it. It’s a nice upgrade over the 4. I like the thinner size, the bigger screen, the faster processor, and the super awesome camera. All things considered, it’s pretty damn sweet. I even have been using Siri in the car to play music and send quick text messages.

There’s a lot of buzz around Apple maps being terrible and some android phones being better. For me, Apple maps have been great although i just installed Google Maps and found that to be even better. I’m sure some Android phones are better or at least come close to the iPhone, but at this point, they are all basically the same. We’re so far past regular cell phones that are just phones that we’re all winners. These smartphones are just ridiculous in what they can do. Quibbling over megapixels, LTE coverage, the number of apps, and features such as turn-by-turn is such a great problem to have.